I’ve been approached by Classical Actors Ensemble to serve as a poetic liasion for the Kickstarter campaign they’re running for their Spring 2014 Repertory of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet and Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.

What this means in practice is that if you back the project at the level of Crown Sonnet or above, you will be commissioning a sonnet written by me (in addition to a bunch of pretty nifty rewards). Here’s a sample of that would look like:

You’ll be able to address the sonnet you commission to anyone of your choosing or specify a particular subject. It could be a grand romantic gesture or a sentimental token. Want to star in the sonnet yourself? Create an amazing gift? Make your guy or gal swoon? Immortalize your cat in verse? Whatever you want, a custom sonnet is guaranteed to be unforgettable.

The kickstarter only has a couple more days to run, but if you’ve ever thought yourself, “I really wish I could pay Justin Alexander to write a sonnet for me,” then this is really an opportunity that you can’t afford to miss.

(I’ll also be at the Donor’s Reception which you’d receive as a Crown Sonnet backer, so if you’re local to Minneapolis and wanted to meet me… Ta-da. That’s literally a privilege which money can apparently buy. Although, realistically, there are probably other ways to make that happen.)

Since you seem to be focusing pretty much on Monte Cook’s games these days, are you planning on writing anything (supplements, adventures) for Monte Cook?

I don’t know if his Numenera system is open-gaming license, maybe he wishes to keep out any authors besides himself and a handpicked coterie. What’s the status on whether its OGL?

If not Numenera, will you be writing more articles about general approaches to refereeing fantasy rpg’s in general, again? I’ve read through all your articles, and even though your previous focus was on 3.x, many of them were so applicable to any style, they were very useful and impressive. It would be nice to see more of them.

If you do some articles in that direction, maybe more elaborations on passive and active observation rolls (details of scuff marks on iron doors noticed, obscure ancient sigils on chests, etc) or detection of traps would be interesting. Your last articles on these were good stuff. Also interesting would be comments on different approaches for old-school, new school, fusions of both – mechanics/approaches to handling player interactions with the environment that trigger effects.

I share Neal’s opinion; I really miss reading Justin’s articles (well, new articles that is) on RPG’s in general and D&D 3.5 in particular. They have proved very useful to me as a DM and I have no doubt that the quality of my games has improved drastically over the past year and I owe most of it to things I’ve read on this site.